The Machines Inside Our Brain: Cognitive Mechanisms of Information Processing

The Machines Inside Our Brain: Cognitive Mechanisms of Information Processing is an innovative anthology that not only provides students with engaging articles pertaining to brain processes of information processing and storage, but also teaches students how to strategically read, analyze, and digest scientific articles.

The collection begins with a comprehensive instructional chapter that teaches students how to approach the consumption and analysis of a scientific article. Readers learn about the compositional features of an article, what it means when an article is peer reviewed, how to effectively annotate an article to increase personal comprehension, and more. Students are then challenged to apply these techniques to the articles within the anthology, then answer a variety of deep, applied questions regarding their contents. The readings within the collection share research cover the variety of cognitive processes that our brains carry out. Specific articles explore attention, automatic processing of information, the manipulation of mental representations, accessing memory, the structure of short-term memory, the nature of knowledge representation, expertise, problem solving, and more.

A unique anthology that shares both classic and cutting-edge research while teaching students how to critically examine scientific articles, The Machines Inside Our Brain is well-suited for courses that focus on memory and brain processes, as well as classes that seek to provide a comprehensive survey of cognitive psychology while teaching students to read the primary scientific literature.